WaPo Editorial Board: Countries are killing the Internet in times of crisis. It's a dangerous move.

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Countries are killing the Internet in times of crisis. It’s a dangerous move.

By Editorial Board July 2 at 6:37 PM

IN THE halcyon days of the Internet, a vision took hold that in a vast global network, no single point could control. Rather, the Internet would flow like water around obstacles. Tim Berners-Lee, a Web pioneer, said that it was originally intended to be a “universal space,” not controlled by a single government or company. President Bill Clinton declared in 2000 that China controlling the Internet in its country would be “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

Today, it is clear those views were naive — as the people of Sudan, Myanmar and Ethi­o­pia recently discovered. The Internet in all three countries went dark after their governments decided to kill it when faced with internal crises. The disruptions showed that the Internet is not truly global; it can be switched off by national rulers. And maybe not just in relatively isolated corners of the world. Russia is also pondering whether it can build a kill switch, though the task would be more difficult in a large country with many connections to the world.

In Myanmar, also known as Burma, the authorities instructed mobile telecommunications operators on June 20 to halt Internet traffic in nine townships in Rakhine and neighboring Chin states, scene of the forced expulsion of more than 720,000 Rohingya Muslims by the military in 2017 and of continuing violence. A Myanmar official said it was “for the sake of security and the public interest,” claiming “the Internet is one of the contributors” to the strife. More likely, the Internet has been a vital lifeline for the persecuted Rohingya to communicate with one another and the outside world. Myanmar has largely barred journalists and international observers from scrutinizing its crackdown; shutting down the Internet is yet another way to conceal its actions.

In Sudan, the Internet was switched off on June 3 as security forces pummeled protesters demanding civilian rule after 30 years of authoritarianism. About 120 people were killed in the crackdown. The country’s two mobile telephone operators were ordered to shut down Internet services through which most people in Sudan access the Web. A month later, the closure remains as a military junta clings to power. Remarkably, even with the digital access sealed off, on Sunday, thousands of people returned to the streets in Khartoum and elsewhere to demand civilian rule. In Ethiopia, the government shut down the Internet for about 100 hours in late June as a failed coup was unfolding.

Of course, shutdown is not the only method for controlling the Web. Despots have learned to infiltrate digital flows with bots and disinformation. China has created what Christopher Walker of the National Endowment for Democracy recently called a “technology-animated police state” in suppressing the Uighur population in the Xinjiang region. Far from the original vision of Internet freedom, to a degree hardly imagined two decades ago, China has harnessed the Internet and technology to serve the party-state. It has nailed the Jell-O to the wall.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/countries-are-killing-the-internet-in-times-of-crisis-its-a-dangerous-move/2019/07/02/6730f008-9c24-11e9-85d6-5211733f92c7_story.html

[lapfog_1]

1. To be completely factual about the origins of the internet

you have to go decades before Tim Berners-Lee (hypertext markup language or html inventor).

Back in the 1960s the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) entertained a proposal for a MILITARY communications project that would not be circuit based (i.e. a wire or wire pair that would be switched between source and destination but which would be electrically connected across the entire path). They were looking at something that was "packet based" where computers would do the switching and parts of one message might take different paths through the network, possibly arriving out out order and a computer would put the message back together. Thus was born the ARPAnet which became the Internet.

The entire concept was "sold" to the government to get funding by explaining that should the US be under a nuclear attack, the Internet would provide a means for command and control to exist even if major circuit switching locations were "taken out" by nuclear attack. The 1960s being the 1960s (duck and cover people!), ARPA funded the project.

Later there was Internet Message Protocol machines that would translate these packets from standard ARPAnet character sets and number representation to character sets and numbers that a particular brand of computer would understand (in the 60s and 70s there were MANY such representations depending on brand.. CDC with 6/12 ASCII, IBM with EBCDIC, GE/Honeywell with 9 bit ASCII, etc

I wrote some of the software for these intermediate translator machines from Burroughs... known as IMPs in 1976.

Arpanet was never intended for the masses... it was for military communications. Al Gore (then Senator Al Gore) sponsored the legislation that would open up the "Internet" to commercial uses in the late 1980s. Previously it was confined to military, government, and academic institutions (more or less).

[Igel]

2. It's sort of the etymological fallacy applied to technology.

It's like saying that the real reason for the interstate system *today* is to transport nuclear missiles.

These things have a way of getting away from the users.

Even the Web wasn't for government use, per se--it was to help get CERN data where it needed to go. So really, the only reason for the Internet these days is because particle physicists need it, which is why everything's set up to make it so easy for physicists and they have top priority.

(Or not. The primary reason for the Internet, as far as I can tell, is so teenage males of any biological age can download porn.)

Another example of tech getting away from its producers' intents is Zyklon. It was a fumigant and pesticide, before it found application a decade or more later in Nazi death camps. (Which some have flipped, because it was used in US agriculture, so that some have claimed the gas the Nazis developed to kill Jews was first tested on killing brown-skinned field workers. Anachronisms abound.)

[ck4829]

3. Disturbing